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- Date:
- Thursday , December 21, 2006
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI P965 Platinum
MSI is no stranger to creating enthusiast motherboards, geared toward PC enthusiasts of all types. Today we look at MSI’s latest offering, the P965 Platinum based on Intel’s popular P965 Express chipset.
MSI (Micro Star International Co. Ltd.) was founded in 1986 and since that time, they have branched out into several markets ranging from VGA cards to notebooks. MSI is best known for its line of motherboards. MSI now brings us their top P965 Express chipset based offering, the P965 Platinum. This board combines Intel’s latest P965 Express chipset, with MSI engineering to create a board that is hopefully worthy of MSI’s reputation in the market place.
The P965 Platinum supports Intel’s legacy Pentium 4, Pentium D, and their newest Core 2 Duo CPUs. The board has dual PCIe x16 slots and is as such is Crossfire compatible. Memory speeds up to DDR 2 800 are officially supported. Following industry trends the P965 Platinum requires only a few components to operate as a full system.
Components needed include a socket LGA775 processor, ATX 2.0 power supply, hard drive, DDR 2 memory and a PCI-Express x16 video card. MSI integrated the following components into the P965 Platinum’s design: 1 EIDE ATA-133 port provided by the JMB 363 controller; 1 floppy port; 6 SATA 3G ports on the ICH8R south bridge; 1 SATA 3G port on the JMicron 363 controller for a total of 7 SATA 3G ports. Additional integrated components are: 10x USB 2.0 capable ports (4 in rear panel, and 3 onboard headers supporting 2 ports each.); 1 Gigabit Ethernet port on the rear panel; On board 8 CH HD Audio CODEC
Supports auto jack sensing and optical S/PDIF Out ports on the back I/O panel and of course, standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The P955 Platinum comes in a standard box, and is packed well to avoid damage. The included accessories are very basic, but are adequate. Bundled with the board are the following items: Quick Guide; User’s manual; product registration flyer; 3 SATA cables; 2 SATA to 4 pin Molex power converters; 1 round ATA-133 cable; 1 round floppy cable; I/O shield; and 1 USB bracket with LAN status LEDs.
Board Layout
As with most of MSI’s latest offerings, the layout of this board is nearly exceptional and has only one real flaw. The flaw is with the placement of the SATA ports attached to the ICH8R south bridge. There are clearance issues with the use of certain video cards. Specifically there would be clearance issues with the use of the 7950GX2 and X1950XTX. I used two X1800XT’s in Crossfire mode for my testing, and they barely allowed me to connect SATA devices to the row of SATA ports on the right. (Assuming you are looking at the motherboard oriented with the CPU socket to the right, and the backplane to the top of the board.) One final point on the layout is the location of the 7th SATA port. It is located directly below the last PCI slot and therefore isn’t ideal for cabling purposes and is in a generally awkward location. None of these issues are necessarily a deal breaker, you can work around them with the use of right angle SATA cables or possibly the use of a different video card or video card cooling solution. It’s really just something to be aware of. The PCB tested was revision 1.1.
The CPU area is free of obstructions and the CPU area is generally well designed. One interesting point to note is the two metal brackets attached over the CPU mounting holes. I am not sure what these do, but to install most any CPU cooler, you will have to remove them. They are steel brackets, and I am really not sure what they do, but I suspect that it is for packing purposes. The brackets are pictured in the photos above.
The board’s 4 DDR 2 DIMM sockets are located in front of the CPU socket in the usual place. The nice thing here is that they are far enough away from the PCIe x16 slots to allow the removal or installation of memory without removal of the video card. They are color coded to denote proper installation method for dual channel operation. I must say I am partial to the more popular alternate configuration of installing memory in ever other slot. This is not a problem, and nothing I would even really think about. I am just nitpicking here.
The north bridge is located just to the left of the CPU area, and is out of the way and passively cooled with a nice aluminum heat sink. At stock operating speeds, the heat sink does get somewhat hot to the touch, but not enough to burn you if you happened to stick your hand on it while in operation. (A practice I do not recommend.) There is also a standard 3 pin fan header here in case someone wanted to replace the passive unit for a more powerful active north bridge cooling unit.
The south bridge is located directly in front of the secondary (yellow) PCIe x16 slot (electrically x4). The south bridge is passively cooled just like the north bridge. Interestingly, there is a plate attached to the heat sink that rattled while I moved the board around for shooting photos and installation into my test bench. It did not rattle while in use though. Like the north bridge cooler, this cooler seemed adequate.
The P965 Platinum has two PCIe x16 slots (one is electrically x4), 2 PCIe x1 slots, and two legacy PCI slots. This is a great layout, with great spacing and is ideal for almost any system configuration. Of course this comes as no shock to me, as this is a design element MSI has always excelled at. The P965 Platinum includes the following ports on the backplane; 4 USB ports; 1 PS/2 mouse port; 1 PS/2 keyboard port; 1 RJ-45 ports; 5 mini-headphone jacks for audio; 1 optical; 1 SPDIF out connector; 1 RS232 port; 1 IEEE1394 port and one parallel port.